The war of the words | Science | The Guardian The war of the words The world's best scientists nominate their favourite authors "Magic equals science, and science of the future equals magic": Phillip K Dick The war of the words The world's best scientists nominate their favourite authors Close 1 Isaac Asimov As predictable as the human race eventually being enslaved by robots, Asimov, the founding father of modern science fiction, tops the poll. Despite an astonishingly prolific career, he has never been regarded highly for his prose. "Asimov was not a stylish writer in the way that say, Philip K Dick was, but he was very rigorous scientifically, and thoughtful about how he projects scientific ideas into the future," says Philip Ball, a writer of popular science books. Two works mark him out as the master of the genre: I, Robot, and the Foundation trilogy. Last month, Will Smith got jiggy in I, Robot, a film version so distant from the source that the credits say only "suggested by Isaac Asimov's book".

In the Foundation series, science and maths were used to predict and plan the development of societies, a device that Mark Brake, professor of science communication at the University of Glamorgan, thinks may be a touch heavy-handed: "We can't even predict a flood in Boscastle, let alone how a society behaves a thousand years in the future." Trained as a chemist, Asimov, who was born in 1920, held a teaching post at Boston University for many years. As well as his fiction, he wrote many popular guides to science. His scientific credentials were recognised when he had an asteroid (5020) named after him - as is Honda's humanoid prototype robot ASIMO. He died in 1992. "Unlike a lot of sci-fi writers, Asimov knew how to explain the science, and was a great populariser of real science," says Brake.

"But what sets him aside is that he was also masterful at documenting human responses to scientific progress." 2 John Wyndham Born John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris in Knowle, Warwickshire in 1903, he was one of the few science fiction authors to become hugely popular with people who never normally read science fiction. The Day of The Triffids, written in 1951, has been stunningly popular as a novel, radio serial and a rather terrible film. In the book, a comet effectively blinds most of the planet, which gives a set of seemingly innocent perambulating plants, the triffids, their chance to bid for world domination. Like The Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, the book now seems to be a Cold War paranoia novel. At the time, it just seemed wonderfully gripping. Wyndham followed up with a handful of other thriller-chillers: The Chrysalids, The Midwich Cuckoos, The Kraken Wakes. All were bestsellers. He died in 1969.

"He was exploring the societal, political and other dimensions as a consequence of something happening in science," says Julia Higgins, professor of polymer science at Imperial College, London. "They were good novels in which there were real people, and the science issues simply pushed the real people into interesting situations." 3 Fred Hoyle One of Britain's most creative scientists, Hoyle was as well known for his influential work in the postwar years as an astrophysicist as he was as a science fiction author. Based in Cambridge, first as lecturer in mathematics, and from 1958 as professor of astronomy, he also worked in the US. Hoyle's first novel, The Black Cloud (1957), is cited by evolutionary biologist and author Richard Dawkins, as his most influential science fiction work. "In The Black Cloud I learned about scientific method and information theory - the interchangeability of different kinds of information." In the novel, humans try to communicate with an alien intelligence in the form of a cloud of gas, by playing it piano music translated into radio signals. "Today we see information theory in genetic code and the translation of information from one computer to another," says Dawkins.

Hoyle wrote and co-authored other books before his death in 2001, including A for Andromeda: A Novel for Tomorrow (1962), Ossian's Ride (1959); and October the First is Too Late (1966). But it is The Black Cloud for which he is chiefly remembered. "The hero in The Black Cloud is spectacularly unpleasant. He is a male scientist who is arrogant, even fascist. This is very unfortunate and seems to be characteristic in Fred Hoyle's books," says Dawkins. 4 Philip K Dick "Magic equals science, and science of the future equals magic," said Philip K Dick, whose works are regarded as increasingly prescient. Certainly he is one of the most adapted science fiction novelists: Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? became Blade Runner, We Can Remember It For You Wholesale became Total Recall and Minority Report was filmed by Steven Spielberg in 2002. But his cerebral work was underrated for years until Blade Runner brought acclaim - only months after he had died of a stroke. "The fact that what Dick is entertaining us about is reality and madness, time and death, sin and salvation, has escaped most critics," says Ursula K Le Guin.

"Most of Dick's books are concerned with the question of how do we know what is real. These are the key questions for all of us who study the neural correlates of consciousness," says Chris Frith of University College London's Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience. 5 HG Wells Socialist, journalist, historian, and author, Herbert George Wells was nothing if not prolific before his death in 1946. He predicted the invention of tanks, aerial bombing, nuclear war, gas warfare, lasers and industrial robots. His scientific background (he studied biology under TH Huxley) led him to produce iconic tales such as The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds - almost entirely pessimistic about human nature and the future. University College London geneticist Steve Jones admires The Time Machine: "to my mind the most significant piece of science fiction. The protagonist goes forward thousands of years to find a peaceful society populated by the Eloi, a highly evolved race who sat around chatting and reading the Guardian.

Of course, their secret is that they are the crop of a terrible underclass, the Morlocks, who come out at night and eat them." 6 Ursula K Le Guin Her two most famous works are The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and The Earthsea Quartet (1968-1990), but this diverse author has produced over 19 novels of science fiction and fantasy, nine volumes of short stories, essays, translations, 13 children's books and poetry. She even collaborated with avant garde composer David Bedford on an opera in 1985 - she wrote the libretto for Rigel 9, about a group of astronauts on a strange planet. The twist is, only one of the astronauts can see an alien city. Her works are vehicles for her evolving views on feminism, environmentalism and utopia and some have been described as "didactic". "It's very meaningful in thinking about gender issues," says Diana Liverman, director of the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University.

7 Arthur C Clarke Sixty books, 50m copies in print, and a link with some of the 20th century's most indelible ideas: not bad for a boy from Minehead in Somerset. He was born in 1917, and signalled his space odyssey intentions by joining the British Interplanetary Society before the second world war. He worked on radar in the RAF and in 1945 submitted a technical paper called Extraterrestrial Relays, laying down the principles of satellite communication in geostationary orbits. He graduated with first class honours in physics and mathematics from King's College London in 1948. About 25 years later, the world caught up with him. He worked with Stanley Kubrick on the film of 2001: A Space Odyssey. He was a CBS broadcaster on the Apollo missions with Walter Cronkite, and he is famous for three laws, known as Clarke's Laws and a clutch of unforgettable sci-fi novels and short story collections, such as Childhood's End, Rendezvous with Rama and The Nine Billion Names of God.

A polio victim in childhood, and an underwater diver, he has lived in Sri Lanka since 1956. 8 Ray Bradbury Has published more than 500 works but is most famous for epics such as The Martian Chronicles (1950) and Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962). His most influential work is Fahrenheit 451 (1953), set in a dystopian future where firemen burn books - Fahrenheit 451 is the ignition temperature of paper. It's a tale which still resonates today. "I used to read lots of science fiction during my teens," says Robert May, biologist and president of the Royal Society, "Fahrenheit 451 is a great book that was turned into a great movie." "People call me a science fiction writer, but I don't think that's quite true," says Bradbury on his website.

"I think that I'm a magician who is capable of making things appear and disappear right in front of you and you don't know how it happened." 9 Frank Herbert "While writing the third Dune book," Herbert said, "I first realised consciously that I had to be an entertainer above all, that I was in the entertainment business." Nominated for the successful Dune series of novels, which has been translated into dozens of languages, has outsold any science fiction novel yet published and became a 1984 film directed by David Lynch. The novel - an epic tale of a desert planet called Arrakis dominated by giant sandworms, the focus of an intricate power struggle in a byzantine interstellar empire - took him six years of research and writing to complete and was rejected by 23 publishers. "The best science fiction transports you to a different kind of world," says Carl Wunsch, professor of physical oceanography at MIT. 10 Stanislaw Lem Lem has sold 27m copies of 2,000 editions in 41 languages, but his books remain curiously hard to find.

He is best known for the haunting Solaris (1961) - filmed twice - but aficionados would probably start enthusing about hugely funny, often startling, books such as The Cyberiad, The Futurlogical Congress, The Star Diaries, and The Tales of Pirx the Pilot. He was born in 1921, in what is now Lvov in Ukraine and studied medicine. He published his first novel in 1948, became a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences in 1972. In 1991, the Austrians awarded him the Kafka Prize for Literature. The New York Review of Books called him "a major writer, and one of the deep spirits of our age". · More on these and many other authors at theguardian.com/books Article Abstracts: #78 (History of Science Fiction Criticism) Arthur B. Evans The Origins of Science Fiction Criticism: From Kepler to Wells Abstract.-- From Johannes Kepler's 1634 notes on his Somnium to essays by and on H.G. Wells in the early twentieth century, there have been many critical explorations of the literature we now call science fiction.

The commentaries of these (often forgotten) early critics are of value principally because they first expressed many--if not most--of those concerns that would later become central to the sf criticism of the twentieth century: the impact of science and technology on human values, the logistics of space travel, the shifting boundaries between the real and the imagined, the portrayal of the alien "other," and the possible futures of our world. Further, they consistently raised key questions about the defining features of the genre itself as it continued to evolve: its preferred themes, its social purpose, its scientific and moral didacticism, its perceived level of verisimilitude, and its place in the Western literary canon. Finally, as the new millennium dawns, it seems appropriate that we look to our distant past to rediscover what these early commentators had to say about the many science fictional works of their times: doing so serves to deepen our understanding of the historical continuity of the ongoing sf debate and to make us aware of both how much and how little has changed over the centuries.

Gary Westfahl The Popular Tradition of Science Fiction Criticism, 1926-1980 Abstract.-- The extensive commentaries produced by members of the science fiction community, called here the popular tradition of science fiction criticism, were launched by the editorial pronouncements and theories of Hugo Gernsback, beginning in 1926 with the first issue of Amazing Stories. In the 1930s, new editorial voices added little to Gernsback's ideas, though writers for the growing numbers of amateur magazines, called fanzines, were offering some distinctive contributions. In the 1940s, editor John W. Campbell, Jr. significantly expanded and deepened Gernsback's theories to articulate a satisfying, mature vision of science fiction. In the decades that followed, many important new commentators emerged: new magazine editors, book reviewers, anthologists, and editors and authors of books about science fiction. In the 1960s, Michael Moorcock and Harlan Ellison led a major effort to reform the genre, the New Wave movement.

Though academic critics often outshone their untrained counterparts in examinations of particular works, the thoroughness, sense of focus, and dedication of the popular commentaries ensured that they would remain valuable resources for science fiction scholars, then and now. Donald M. Hassler The Academic Pioneers of Science Fiction Criticism, 1940-1980 Abstract.--.This is my version of the story of the beginnings of modern academic work on sf from the 1930s until 1980. This work in the academy began with isolated bibliographic efforts and ended with full-blown critical work. A major turning point in the work came with a 1958 seminar at the MLA and the year following, when Extrapolation was founded as the fledgling academic journal and when Kingsley Amis spoke on sf. Another key turning point came with the abundance of criticism in the 1970s. A main element in the story, however, is the suggested link here between the early academics and some of the escapist, "idealist," even fascist values in some sf.

Veronica Hollinger Contemporary Trends in Science Fiction Criticism, 1980-1999 Abstract.-- This overview of sf criticism from 1980 to 1999 is divided into three sections: 1) "Mapping the Field," which recommends some histories, genre studies, media sf studies, and reference guides; 2) "Sf Writers on Sf," which calls attention to a number of non-fiction and critical works by sf authors, as well as to some author interviews; 3) and "When It Changed," which discusses a variety of both feminist and postmodern studies of sf. While this overview does not claim to be a complete listing of every significant study which has appeared in the past twenty years, it does aim to develop the sense of a scholarly field in the middle of an unprecedented expansion, and to indicate some of the ways in which sf, itself an arena of cultural production undergoing various unexpected metamorphoses, is currently being appropriated by other scholarly disciplines for whom it provides a source of important cultural material.

Sf studies itself has branched out into many new directions, been influenced by many complex political and theoretical perspectives, and achieved some legitimacy within academia, due in part to the postmodern turn away from high culture/popular culture distinctions. A review of the critical work published over the last twenty years suggests that sf studies is flourishing as never before, even as efforts to define what sf is/is becoming are being challenged as never before. David Ketterer "Vivisection": Schoolboy "John Wyndham's" First Publication? Abstract.-- In November 1919, four months after his sixteenth birthday, John [Wyndham Parkes Lucas] Beynon Harris published the first part of a story entitled "Vivisection" in the second issue of The Bee, a short-lived journal "Produced by Members of Bedales School." The following year, the complete eight issues of The Bee were published as a single volume by Morland Press, London. "Vivisection," which is clearly inspired by H.G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau, would seem to be both Harris's and, effectively, "John Wyndham's" first publication.

It was as a science fiction writer in the Wellsian mode that John Wyndham received international acclaim and made a significant impact on the development of British and world sf. His schoolboy publication "Vivisection"--here reproduced for the first time--is important because it points directly to the successful second phase of Harris's career, a phase arrived at (five years after World War II) following a pre- and post-war "American" phase (which can now be understood as an instructive detour) as "John Beynon [Harris]," the sole British writer during the 1930s to establish a reputation in such American sf pulp magazines as Wonder Stories. R.D. Mullen Two Early Works By Ray Cummings: "The Fire People" and "Around the Universe" Abstract.-- Ray Cummings (1897-1957), American pulp sf writer once dubbed the "American H.G. Wells," can probably be ranked as the third most popular sf author of the 1920s and 30s, behind Edgar Rice Burroughs and Abraham Merritt.

His 1919 masterpiece "The Girl in the Golden Atom" was arguably one of the most well-known sf novelettes published in the Munsey magazines, and many of his sf works were reprinted as paperback books during the 1950s and 60s. Two of Cummings' magazine stories, however, were never reprinted as books: "The Fire People" (1922) and "Around the Universe" (1923). This article is both a general introduction to the early science fiction of Ray Cummings and a discussion of these two largely forgotten sf narratives. Martin T. Willis Edison as Time Traveler: H.G. Wells's Inspiration for his First Scientific Character Abstract.-- Interpretations of H.G. Wells's Time Traveler have varied considerably. One school of thought views him as the quintessential Victorian hero, another as the classic scientist figure prevalent in many sf narratives. Yet another calls the Time Traveler an Everyman of the later nineteenth century. In fact, H.G. Wells had a historical figure firmly in mind when constructing the character and personality of the Time Traveler: the American inventor Thomas Edison.

Using each version of The Time Machine, from the early short story "The Chronic Argonauts" to the published novel of May 1895, this article reveals the genesis of the Time Traveler in a constant process of trial and error, as Wells sought to identify the characteristics of Thomas Edison most suitable for his own needs. This essay refers to the life and achievements of Thomas Edison in order to illuminate successive changes in the various versions of The Time Machine. The heterogeneity of these narratives--especially their protagonists' respective character traits--speaks to paradoxical qualities in Edison himself, both as a man and as a popular myth. Back to Home Worlds Without End Blog | Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Books Worlds Without End Blog Silent Night by Chewbacca Posted at 11:20 AM by Dave Post Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays everyone! Blade Runner 2049 Trailer! Posted at 4:43 PM by Dave Post Man, I really hope this is as good as it looks. 07 2016 Why Do You Love the Science Fiction You Love? Posted at 2:38 PM by James Wallace Harris Science fiction has always been more than adventure stories for me.

Science fiction is my Aristotle and Augustine, giving meaning to our meaningless reality. When you recall the science fiction tales that meant the most to you, were they thrill rides? Or maps of speculation? I use science to statistically explain how reality works, but I use science fiction to speculate how we can manipulate reality. That was when I was young. Now that I’m older, I use science fiction to imagine how things might play out on Earth after I leave. I’ve often wondered why science fiction is my chosen literature. Why do we pick the things we love? Is it free will, or some kind of adaptation or instinct? If a super-AI studied my habits like human scientists study chimps, what would it make of my choices in literature? Do aspects of my personality explain why I was drawn to science fiction? Over at the Classic Science Fiction book club, we’ve been discussing our personal top ten favorite science fiction stories. What surprised me was the diversity of titles we embraced. Many of the stories are not on my Classics of Science Fiction , a list of the statistically most remembered science fiction books. You can see what stories members picked listed here . This made me wonder why we love the science fiction stories we do. The picks are as individualistic as fingerprints.

There’s been some discussion at the group about all of this, but it inspired me to write this essay. Are we attracted to objectively great books, or do we seek books that mirror our subjective selves? Sometimes I feel there’s no such thing as a great book, at least not in a measurable sense. The books we think are great are merely the ones that reflect our strongest desires. They don’t need to be well written, brilliant, or literary. They just need to trigger emotions. With me it might be accidental that they are science fiction. Or, are science fiction fans the kind of people drawn to the fantastic? Is mundane reality too tame for our ordinary lives? Here are the ten titles I sent the book club. The list might be different on another day, or maybe not. These are the books I reread. These are the books I keep writing about. (Title links in the list go to WWEnd pages, title links in the essay are to older essays.) The Door Into Summer by Robert A. Heinlein (1957) My favorite science fiction is 50 years or older, and written by men. Is this list a Rorschach test for my personality?

I do love modern science fiction, and often think it better written and more sophisticated than my favorites here. And I do prefer the diversity of modern SF. Yet, these are the stories burned in my memory. I read most of these stories before I turned 20. It might be our life-time favorites are the books we read in youth. First impressions are often the lasting impressions. I first read Have Space Suit-Will Travel during the 1964-65 school year, at the dawn of Project Gemini . I was in the 8th grade and dying to blast off into space – just like Kip, the main character. I wished I was like Kip in many ways, but I wasn’t. I wanted to work hard in school, have my own science workshop, and live in a stable happy family located in a small town. None of those were true for me. I’ve read Have Space Suit-Will Travel six or eight times. It is the definitive science fiction novel for me. Back then it was my road map of the future, now it’s the tintype of my nostalgic past.

For some baby boomers growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, the Heinlein juveniles were our substitute for religion. Those twelve books gave us faith, not in a sacred heaven, but in a secular outer space. “ The Star Pit ” is also about the relentless desire to go into space, but ultimately deals with the limitations that hold us back. I first read this story in 1968, when I was slightly older and knew I wasn’t going into space. “The Star Pit” is tattooed on my heart, and whenever I reread it, the story squeezes tears out of my eyes, like beautiful songs of heartbreak. It might be the most mature of the ten stories I list here, even though it was written by the youngest writer at the time. The main character and my father were alcoholics who always had the restless urge to run away. I was Ratlit, and I wished my father had been the older Vyme. This story could easily have been a mainstream literary work without science fictional elements. I imagine its based on Delany’s own experiences, and he knew he wasn’t going into space too.

I read Tunnel in the Sky and Time for the Stars during the same school year as Have Space Suit-Will Travel. Both were about boys who left their families to be on their own. My parents’ marriage was a train wreck, and I wished I could have divorced them. I grew up loving stranded on deserted island stories, and Tunnel was a science fiction version of one. I believe the reason I was so attracted to the Heinlein juveniles is because their teen heroes always found ways to leave their parents. Earth Abides also belongs to one of my favorite kinds of stories – last man on Earth stories. There is a side of me that wishes I was the last man on Earth. I love the idea of starting civilization over with a few other people or even being the last person watching nature reclaim the planet. I’ve always been kind of a loner even though I’ve been married for 38 years and have many friends. My childhood would have crushed most children, but I survived by dreaming, especially science fiction dreams. Empire Star fits me philosophically. I read it maybe in 1967. Delany was closer to my age, and his work felt radically different from all the older science fiction writers I was discovering.

Heinlein was like a father figure, but Delany was like a brother. Empire Star has wise advice for young people going out on their own for the first time. Delany’s insight into simplex, complex and multiplex was the best concept I ever learned from science fiction. I completely identified with both Comet Jo and Ni Ty. I love Confessions of a Crap Artist because it’s how I remember the 1950s. My uncles were crap artists. I think all science fiction fans have a bit of crap artist in them. I love this novel because it shows we’re all crazy in unique ways. I believe this is PKD’s best book. Confessions is somewhat autobiographical, and one of Dick’s attempts to write literary. I love The Man in the High Castle because it’s about a little guy trying to survive in a very strange reality and make sense of it. How universal is that? PKD was great at writing about powerless people. His wife at the time he wrote these novels, Anne R. Dick, has written a memoir of those years, The Search for Philip K. Dick. To become a Dickhead means falling down the rabbit hole of trying to decipher PKD.

I keep rereading his literary novels and his biographies to figure out why he wrote all those bizarrely wonderful novels that resonate with me. I love The Time Machine because I consider it the archetype of science fiction. The time machine was cool, but not the point. Wells’ speculative explorations were epic. That’s how I define science fiction – as speculation. I love The Time Machine in the same way I love Olaf Stapledon’s majestic speculations. This is what I want from science fiction – to think really big thoughts. I fell in love with The Door into Summer for two reasons. First, it’s about inventing robots in a home workshop. I always wanted to build robots. Second, Daniel Boone Davis slept his way into the future, and I would love to do that. I wish I could take 50-year naps to see how history progresses. There are many other science fiction books I love, but for the moment, these are the ten I picked to share with the book club members. Picking ten books is just something fun we did this week, but I think our choices are revealing. Certainly more telling than exchanging astrological signs, maybe with as much validity as a Briggs-Myers test.

If you want to be revealing, list the ten science fiction stories you love most in the comments below. We are the Disaster » IAI TV We are the Disaster Suburban apocalypse, augmented reality, and the twin giants of science fiction. Simon Ings | Novelist, science writer and editor of Arc, New Scientist's magazine about the future Simon Ings is a novelist, science writer and editor of Arc, New Scientist's magazine about the future. His latest novel, Wolves, explores an imagined future world where Augmented Reality reigns. Here, he speaks to Vassili Christodoulou about science fiction, J.G. Ballard, and whether Google Glass will ever really take off. Wolves is identified as... Simon Ings is a novelist, science writer and editor of Arc, New Scientist's magazine about the future. His latest novel, Wolves, explores an imagined future world where Augmented Reality reigns. Here, he speaks to Vassili Christodoulou about science fiction, J.G. Ballard, and whether Google Glass will ever really take off. Wolves is identified as a tribute to Ballard. What do you consider his influence on you as a writer and contemporary literature and science fiction as a whole?

It's much more an homage to John Wyndham than to Ballard. Wyndham lived near my home town and the house where my protagonist dispenses the body of his mother is actually the house where Wyndham lived. So there’s a bit of self-indulgent forelock tugging there. Obviously no writer of my generation or the generation previously is going to be without influence from Ballard, but I think what’s especially interesting is where Ballard is drawing his influences from, largely Joseph Conrad. That form of delivery, that very calm, almost hypnogogically lucid, form of delivery is something we’ve inherited with our mother’s milk if you like. Ballard harnessed a particular British tradition of fantasy with an interest in apocalyptic adventure narratives derived from the American tradition, and then played a very clever game by saying that things which were already happening in the real world were now happening to middle-class white people. This is a perfectly legitimate thing to do and is salutary, as well as entertaining, for the middle-class white people who read his books. Presumably because it’s not actually happening to them in quite the way he imagines? For example: we rarely see blocks of luxury flats descend into civil war in the real world.

Sure, but had you been in Mozambique during the civil war in the 1970s, you'd have found a city where blocks of flats still stood, but with all the wood – including floorboards – taken out and used to cook food on the balconies of tower blocks. It all exists within a world of metonym and metaphor. Your protagonist is called Conrad – were you, like Ballard, referring back to Joseph Conrad? That happened quite late actually. I needed to strip out all the identifying marks, or at least as many cultural markers as I could, from the book in order to make it work. One problem with writing about a real emerging technology – there’s virtually nothing in that book that isn’t real in some form or other – is that it dates faster than your average unrefrigerated yoghurt. In order to maintain the realism and not have the book become out-of-date as I was writing it, I found myself needing to remove the cultural specificity. I delivered a draft and then realised, even as I pressed the send button, that all my names were English, irremediably English, and that they had no pan-European quality to them whatsoever.

All the names were changed at the last minute, so changing my main character's name to Conrad was a happy Freudian slip – a last-minute Freudian act that I'm now quite chuffed about, and which I'm sure Jimmy Ballard would appreciate. One of the more subversive qualities of Ballard’s fiction is the sense of psychic fulfilment that his characters feel as the cataclysm unfolds around them. In Wolves the protagonist’s best friend writes apocalyptic fiction and seems to be a tribute to the Ballardian hero, whereas the hero Conrad is more conservative: more Wyndham-esque, if you will. Was this a conscious dichotomy? The character who wishes to write about, and indeed succeeds in writing post-apocalyptic narratives with heroic elements, is based on a friend of mine who wrote like that when he was 14 – as a lot of us did – and then continued to think how to build a redoubt against the coming apocalypse for several years after. I’m really interested – and this is where the Ballard influence kicks in fairly clearly – in the way in which all our civilisations are at heart completely mad.

They have to be, in a way, because they’re taking a very big world and turning it into some sort of anthropocentric or anthropophilic game. In effect, the reason that we don’t all dash out and commit terrible crimes and steal from each other is because we’d rather play the game. Most of us would rather play a game than ignore civilisation entirely and run off into the wild. This is what science fiction feeds on at all times. Because when it tries to posit the future, what it’s really doing is saying: if this present moment went on forever, so that the cracks started to show, what would it be like? And the answer to the question is that it would be a nightmare. Any present moment taken beyond its natural life, any present moment preserved over time, becomes increasingly nightmarish. You see this in any kind of totalitarian state where the state uses its resources to preserve the present moment forever as much as possible. I mean, there’s a reason why tyrants generally – and this is amazing, I found this out in a book recently – tyrants almost never have mirrors over their bathroom sinks: what they have is a portrait of themselves at a younger age.

This has been true of Hitler, it was true of Napoleon, it was true of Saddam Hussein. It's absolutely fantastic, this idea of freezing time in order to preserve your vision of how you’re going make the world work. I think what Ballard spotted, and what a lot of us have been playing with and exploiting since, is this idea that the disaster itself is already under way. This is Wyndham’s nightmare actually. Before Ballard said it, Wyndham said “we are the disaster” – the idea that it's only our politics or our culture that makes it seem that we are in some kind of operational status, but actually the disaster is going on all around us. Apocalyptic narratives, adventure stories and post-apocalyptic narratives are basically lies; they’re comforting lies because they say the disaster is over there, implying that you can so something about it. “It's coming, but it's not here yet” is a way of preventing the future, when the truth is we're already in the future, we're already the disaster.

That’s why – to be indulgent for a minute – my favourite bit of Wolves is the line saying, “how can it be the disaster, it's got pudding.” You’re looking at the menu and going “yeah, it's disaster”, but it's not how you normally think of disaster because there are menus with puddings on them. And I think this was my deliberate extreme domestication of Ballard, because his heroes have been deprived of a politic if you like, of a polis, of community. Their anthropocentric reading of the world is increasingly personal, increasingly neurotic, increasingly Freudian, increasingly fantastic and more and more obviously crazy. Whether it's the madness of a character who is seen to be deranged, or the madness of an environment which is clearly fantastical, but which you believe for the purpose of the novel, despite an awareness that Ballard is playing a deep, metaphorical game. This is something that a writer who had a big influence on me, M. John Harrison, is very good on. He’s very good on the politics of the game, mainly because he’s been playing it for ages.

He gets this out of Wyndham Lewis, the fact that politics is insane, that the very act of politics is insane, but a necessary insanity. It’s a necessary game you play so that you stay within the tribe and don’t disappear into the greater world because you simply wouldn’t survive there. In Wolves the apocalypse looks like it's about to happen three quarters of the way through and then never really does. So it’s almost like you’ve looked Ballard in the eye and turned back towards Harrison instead? Well the thing is you’ll never know whether the disaster has happened or not, because you only see the domestic lives of the characters. The only glimpse of the wider picture is a false one – which is the one of the reasons commercial post-apocalyptic fiction is doing very nicely at cinemas near you. The hints at collapse actually increase throughout the book, but you’re never entirely sure what to believe because it doesn't look like a typical collapse. I mean, you can still get to the room downtown, but when you get there you find that there isn’t any copper in the wiring because it's been nicked. You drop in little hints like that and gather them up, so that they build into something.

But the reader will probably only pick them up on the second reading because they're too busy with the personal on the first go. I think that’s what I tried to bring to this, that just as your personal life means that you don’t always recycle your garbage at the end of the week – you know, the “everyone wants to save the world, but no one wants to do the washing up” idea. The personal life is always going to count more than the political. I can remember what I was doing when the Berlin wall came down, but what I was doing was more important to me, to my history, than the fact that the Berlin wall came down. The public perception of augmented reality is very much the Google Glass model – none of us really know what else it’s for. But, as you mention, there are real companies looking to delete swathes of the world from our perception. When you were thinking about the technological schemes of the book, how important was it to you to extrapolate what you saw as real-world trends plausibly, given that science fiction writers so often run wild? What interested me primarily about augmented reality (AR) was the huge gap between the hype and the reality.

While there’s always a gap between the hype and the reality in technology, the interesting thing about AR is that it's got a huge problem at its heart yet to be solved, and that is that you’ve got to put the damn glasses on for it to work. I wrote a book about eyesight some years ago for Bloomsbury and what was interesting then was that the first guy to get an artificial retina – they’re still being developed and the really good ones are still in the early stages, so this was quite a primitive effort – the first thing he did was to jack into his television so he could read Ceefax to look for the investment pages so he could trade on his stocks and shares. Prior to the operation, he could navigate the New York subway, but he couldn’t read the stocks and shares. It interested me that it was only in this extreme case, an extraordinary operation conducted on someone who had been blind, that there was a reason to put the glasses on. At the end of the novel one of the characters considers having eye surgery to experience augmented reality all the time, and there are also hints of technology that can directly interfere with your mind via magnetism. That’s already been done!

I was going to ask if that was satirical! In dealing with such a young technology, without dropping brand names in so as to date it, I was in a good position to start playing with some of the weirder nightmares associated with this technology. Once I'd embarked upon the book, I was very careful not to have too many conversations with people I'd been working with in these little start-up companies, because I didn’t want the next big idea to interfere with what I was doing. And of course the big idea that does change the game is Google Glass, because it's not about presenting information to you; it's about gathering information about you and selling it back to you as a product. In a way I’m very glad I didn’t get into the politics of Google Glass until I finished the book, because I wanted the book to be about eyes – it’s the novel I wanted to write since I wrote the eye book. Do you think Google Glass will become commercially popular? The most common criticism of Glass is that it looks so uncool that no one will ever want to wear it. That is a huge problem Maybe if Jonathan Ive had designed it?

I think it’ll find its market – whether it's going to be a huge market, I don’t know. . Would you say your attitude to augmented reality in the long run is a muted one? You expect it to have a small impact on the way we do things, but ultimately just become one tool among all of our tools, not a world-changer. I honestly think that the gamification might just be enough, oddly, because it has so little immediate practical use, because it’s getting in your face and in your way. There are some people who love to have technology get between them and the world – we know these people and we tend to avoid them if possible, but they will always be there. There will always be people who shove Glass in front of their face from day one, that’s just part of the bell curve of human nature. I think for the rest of us we’re looking for some kind of utility. But maybe augmented reality is the most fantastic gaming platform in the world. It may be that, if we’re canny about it and we’re not tripping over our own feet, AR may just work as the most fantastic gaming medium we’ve come across. It could be the thing after video games, it could be gigantic.

I think it’s a lot more playful than people give it credit for – I think it's much more of a play medium than a utility.

Question: What was the real surname of British science fiction writer John Wyndham?
Answer: Harris